“I feel like poetry gets mislabeled as a high art that’s exclusionary in some way,” says Gabriel Fried ’96, a poet, teacher, and poetry editor. “Rob made things intimate, but he was never exclusionary. If you wanted in, you got admitted in.”

“Rob” is Rob Farnsworth, retiring after this academic year as senior lecturer in English. Author of three poetry collections, poetry editor for seven years of the quarterly American Scholar, and founder of the creative writing program and the Literary Arts Live reading series at Bates, he was a mentor to Fried — and to many others who have studied poetry, both the reading and the writing of it, with Farnsworth during his 26 years here.

On Feb. 12, Literary Arts Live presented Fried and two other alumni poets at the Muskie Archives for a reading and a tribute to that longtime champion of creative writing at Bates. Farnsworth himself had offered an LAL reading three weeks earlier.

Rob Farnsworth reads his poem “Vagrancy” during the Literary Arts Live session on Jan. 25 in Muskie Archives. An homage to W.B. Yeats, whose poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” Farnsworth references, the poem is about the “specific, anonymous, reorienting pleasures of solitary travel.”

Joining Fried were Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01. Barter didn’t study with Farnsworth, but they are friends who met when Farnsworth published Barter in The American Scholar. Barter’s latest published collection is Bye-bye Land, which received the Isabella Gardner Prize. A trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park, he served as the park’s poet laureate during its centennial year, 2016.

Teicher is director of special editorial projects at Publishers Weekly, teaches creative writing at New York University, is a literature and music critic, and has published four books. Brenda Is in the Room was awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

And Fried is poetry editor for Persea Books and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, and has published two poetry collections. His Making the New Lamb Take was named a Best Book of 2007 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

During their Bates visit, the trio talked with us about cold weather at Bates, reasons for making poetry — and, of course, Rob Farnsworth.

Christian Barter ’90, at center, makes a point while fellow poets Gabe Fried ’96, at left, and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 listen. Visiting Bates for an evening poetry reading on Feb. 12, they met with students in the Muskie Archives during the afternoon. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Christian, you barely overlapped with Rob when you were here. How did you get to know him?

Barter: A teacher I had in graduate school, poet Sydney Lea, told me that Rob was the poetry editor at The American Scholar — “I think he’d like your work, maybe you should send him some poems.” So Rob took a couple poems of mine. A few years after that, when my first book came out, he asked me if I’d like to read at Bates. And then I got to meet him in person, and of course immediately liked him.

Craig and Gabe, what are some early impressions from studying with Rob?

Teicher: For me, very clearly, it was Rob’s way of teaching, which was to ask us questions very articulately, and then to hold us to a high standard as to how we answered them. It deeply matched the reason I got into poetry in the first place, which was the need to put things into my own words all the time — just to try to get something said that I didn’t think anybody was listening to.

I was amazed to realize there was a man who taught that way and that I could take classes with him. I was like, “Oh, if this is what poetry is for, then I want to do it.” Then I just took every class I could with Rob, and we’ve stayed friends since.

Fried: I don’t know if I have ever met a more perfect teacher of undergraduates. He would recognize something in an incipient writer that they wouldn’t even know themselves was impressive, and he’d focus on that rather than on all the things that could be fixed or changed.

Shown gesturing for emphasis during the Feb. 12 poets’ gathering with students, faculty, and staff, Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 has published four books of poetry and prose. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Is Rob present in your teaching?

Teicher: Exclusively and always. I had a marvelous 10th-grade English teacher who also taught by summoning articulate responses, and Rob showed me a more mature version of that. And that’s the only way that I know how to teach — basically I sit down in a room with a book and start asking questions.

Fried: To really listen to how students are responding, to help them know what questions to ask of a poem, but then to let them do the asking and to underscore the ways in which they have made important observations about a poem — that all comes from Rob.

How have your reasons for writing poetry evolved over the years?

Barter: At first, I was writing very much day-to-day poems of observation. For better or worse, I’m now writing more with a world view in mind and more consciously trying to tackle larger issues in my work, though always grounded by real-life things. I’ve become very interested in writing topical poems about climate change and the political atmosphere in which we live, and that kind of thing.

Teicher: Getting married and having kids really changed what I thought poetry was for. My son has pretty severe cerebral palsy, and so most of my latest book, The Trembling Answers, comes out of a period five or six years ago when he was severely medicalized It was a period of having a lot of experiences that only my wife and I could share. Again, it’s that thing of having to say something that you need to have understood, so you need to find a way of explaining it such that people might be able to understand it.

Poet Rob Farnsworth was among the listeners in the Muskie Archives as three alumni poets, including two of his former students, talked with students, staff, and faculty on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Fried: Writing poems made sense to me, because I loved to play with words, shift them around and make noises with them. But my impetus for writing poems has always been to try to figure out nostalgia, feelings of memory and longing, and trying to parse how much of that is self-generated and how much of it comes out of the initial experiences that we’re nostalgic for.

Anything you’d like to add about your Bates education overall, or your feelings about visiting?

Barter: I needed to grow up more than many when I got here. I started here at 17 and my first year was pretty rough. But then I found my people, which is where so much of it begins for all of us. And that was just a wonderful blessing and that’s the wonderful thing about Bates — you can find your people here.

As far as me becoming an artist, it was a process of learning how to be disciplined and learning how to be effective. That happened largely through learning to compose music, and Bill Matthews was a big part of that for me as my mentor. He taught me a lot, not just about writing music, but about being an artist and what it takes to actually make something as an artist, and not just dream.

Teicher: I was looking around today and realizing that there’s nowhere that I can look here that doesn’t give me a strong memory of something that happened. And to me, the students look really similar to my peers. And that may be just because they’re just as cold as we were and therefore bundled up in similar clothing.

Poet Gabe Fried ’96 answers a question from the audience as Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 look on. Fried’s classmate and Lecturer in English Jess Anthony, at left, and Senior Lecturer in English Rob Farnsworth, in white shirt, presented the three poets at Bates on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2018/02/21/113391/feed/0Look What We Found: Robert Frost in a Bates poet’s officehttp://www.bates.edu/news/2017/09/12/look-what-we-found-the-sobering-presence-of-robert-frost/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/09/12/look-what-we-found-the-sobering-presence-of-robert-frost/#respondTue, 12 Sep 2017 18:11:40 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=109522On a bookcase facing Rob Farnsworth sits a bust of poet Robert Frost, "presiding over everything that gets said in here."]]>

From his third-floor office in Hathorn Hall, Robert Farnsworth, poet and senior lecturer in English, has a beautiful view of the Historic Quad.

The poet is being viewed, too. Atop a bookshelf sits a bust of Robert Frost, “presiding over everything that gets said in here,” notes Farnsworth. “He’s a sobering presence.”

Farnsworth received the bust from a colleague who, some 20-odd years ago, was trying to clear out an office. (It’s a rite of passage for retiring faculty: Give away all that you can’t bear to trash.)

Before Farnsworth brought the head to his office, it sat in his garage just long enough for his young sons to start clowning around with it. You know what happened next. “One of them came running up the stairs saying, ‘Dad! Dad! Robert Frost’s head has fallen off!’ which I thought was an extraordinary thing.”

Farnsworth glued everything back together. Taking a bit of poetic license, he disguised the glue mark with a tiny cloth bird he found walking home one day. “He’s nestled in his collar there,” Farnsworth says.

A tiny cloth bird sits nestled in the collar of the Robert Frost bust in Rob Farnsworth’s office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

At Bates, Farnsworth teaches Frost in a course that also loops in Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams — “three American modernists who stayed home, rather than going to Paris or London,” he says.

Still, when Farnsworth was younger, Frost was not one of his favorites. That changed in grad school at Columbia University when he studied Frost with Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Also contributing to his veneration of the poet was the summer that Farnsworth spent, in 2006, living and writing in Frost’s home in Franconia, N.H.

Farnsworth now finds the poet “indispensable.” He’s come to “revere him, not just enjoy him.”

What impresses Farnsworth most is Frost’s “canniness, his slant way of getting at big truths without rhetorical flourish in a very immediate and ordinary sort of way.”

Frost had a great ear, Farnsworth says, “one of the best ears of any English poet for speech, for how people actually talk, and for the metres of prosody in English and in American English. And he put those things to work in extraordinary ways.”

Frost has a “slant way of getting at big truths without rhetorical flourish in a very immediate and ordinary sort of way,” says Rob Farnsworth. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

However figurative, the bust plays an active role in the office, says Farnsworth.

“He’s a kind of presiding genius, a little tiki, you know, a Polynesian saint. He keeps an eye on me, but then these guys do too,” Farnsworth hastens to add, pointing to depictions of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Robert Hayden that hang on his walls.

“I try to keep these good vibrations filling up the room,” he says. “I hope that this has an influence on the students who come to study poetry.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/09/12/look-what-we-found-the-sobering-presence-of-robert-frost/feed/0Celebrate Thoreau’s 200th birthday with a summer poem from a Bates authorhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2017/07/10/chute-thoreau-heat-wave-in-concord/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/07/10/chute-thoreau-heat-wave-in-concord/#respondMon, 10 Jul 2017 16:13:34 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=108644Chute's "Heat Wave in Concord" recreates a sizzling summer day in 1852 when Thoreau and a friend went on a "fluvial walk" in the Concord River. ]]>

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau on July 12, here’s a summertime poem by Professor Emeritus of Biology Robert Chute, a noted Maine poet.

Chute’s “Heat Wave in Concord” reimagines a sizzling summer day in 1852 when Thoreau and a friend, William Ellery Channing, waded into the river and walked up and down its shoreline.

Thoreau called such jaunts “fluvial walks.” In his journal on July 10, 1852, he noted that the Assabet River (which joins the Sudbury River to form the Concord River) was the “properest highway for this weather.”

The poem’s opening epigraph is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which a young woman watches 28 naked men bathing in a river and imagines joining them.

Published in 1996, the poem won the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Heat Wave in Concord

By Robert Chute

I

Farmers working the fields quit early,
as much for ox or horse as for men –
one old man had already died; exhausted
by heat, wrung out, wrinkled
like dried fruit.

Their women, buttoned, laced, strapped
under petticoats, skirts, sleeves,
sit and work, work and sit
in the dim, dead heat
of parlor, kitchen, and shed.

But one, an exceptional one, in
a windowless storage room, stands,
naked and white in a wash tub’s cold ring.
Her cast off clothes spilled
like dried discarded flowers.

The tinned dipper lifts water, still cool
from the well, again and again. The water
passing over her body like
unseen fingers and back
to the tub again.

Perhaps one of them also dreams of the river,
of young men who float there,
pale bellies tempting the sun.

II

From houses on opposite sides
of the elm-roofed main street Henry
and Ellery, leaving dishes and scraps
of cold dinner behind,
meet, retreat to the river.

A man stands in a barn door, his shirt
stained with sweat, hat hanging slack
in his hand. A woman in the shed’s
dark cave churns the morning’s milk
the heat would soon sour.

They shake their heads. What beside envy
do they feel as these renegades slip away?
Do they imagine how it feels to peel
close, sweaty clothes away,
let the waters have their play?

At the river Henry explains that banks have
a gender, this one, for example, being
convex, alluvial, gradual, and
feminine; the opposite, concave,
undercut, and masculine.

Ellery makes some comments that
Henry’s Journal will never repeat.
They strip and wade in.

III

Soon, by the opposite, masculine, shore, up
to their chins, they face the current.
The heat of the day is carried
down, away. They wade upstream,
wearing their hats against the sun.

They hold their bundled clothing high.
From deep holes to shallows
the water falls, rises again.
Chest, ankle, knee, belly,
chest, and down again.

Rounding a bend they see the plank bridge.
Boys, their work done, race and strip
and plunge. Boys breaching
and splashing; marble boys riding
imaginary dolphins.

On the bank one boy sits, lifting a foot
to examine some bruise, fixed
in an instant as an engraving in
an antiquities book; but subtly
colored, sunburned, bare.

The two men put on shirts now, feeling the sting
of the sun. Bridge rails bleed pitch,
the planks shrink.

IV

The drying tails of their shirts stick
to their buttocks and thighs. Perhaps
because of the shirts they feel undressed,
retreat to the water. The water, like
unseen fingers, passes over them.

They wade on into a shaded, shallower reach
of late afternoon, hear the clang
of a distant bell. Some farmer’s wife
signaling an early supper. They climb out
on the feminine side.

They wait for the air to dry them. How long
this single mile of fluvial walk
has seemed, passing from present
to pastoral to classical,
back to the present again.

They dress, turn toward the world of women
where mother, sister, or wife waits. The day
slides toward evening and the moon.

Professor Emeritus of Biology Robert M. Chute is an award-winning Maine poet.

N.B.: Thoreau records his “fluvial walks” in the Journal for 1852. He read Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ including, we assume, the song of the 29th bather in 1856.

Thoreau’s comment: “As for the sensuality in Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ I do not so much wish it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/07/10/chute-thoreau-heat-wave-in-concord/feed/0Q&A: Poet Robert Strong on ‘Bright Advent’ and King Philip’s Warhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2017/06/15/qa-poet-robert-strong-on-bright-advent-and-king-philips-war/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/06/15/qa-poet-robert-strong-on-bright-advent-and-king-philips-war/#respondThu, 15 Jun 2017 20:21:38 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=108309A poet and Bates College faculty member, Robert Strong explores the origins of King Philip's War in his latest book, Bright Advent.]]>

If there’s an atlas of the roads to hell that were paved with good intentions, special mention must be made of the 17th-century Puritan effort to convert New England’s Native Americans to Christianity.

Benefiting from an early harmony between the natives and English colonists, the effort gained substantial ground for decades, largely due to the exertions of the Puritan John Eliot, who made it his life’s work to convert the natives.

Paralleling this cultural encroachment, of course, was the territorial grabbery that was practiced by growing numbers of colonists throughout the century, and that ultimately led to the outbreak of war between Europeans and Native Americans in the 1670s.

A poet and Bates faculty member, Robert Strong explores the origins of that devastating and transformative war, known as King Philip’s War, in his latest book, Bright Advent. The book focuses on Eliot; Metacom, aka King Philip, chief of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts; and John Sassamon, a Massachusett who worked with Eliot to translate the Bible into Algonquian, and whose murder begins both Strong’s narrative and the war.

Robert Strong reads “Anne Eliot” from Bright Advent:

A writer should consult period documents before rendering history as poetry, but Strong goes a step further with Bright Advent. The book combines his original poetry with verbatim excerpts from 17th-century documentary materials, notably letters and other writings by Eliot.

Director of national fellowships and a lecturer in English at Bates, Strong spoke to us about the use of single quotation marks, the power of Puritan language, and a prayer he wrote for the Big Mac.

What’s your book about?

The book is about the translation of the Bible in a collaborative project between Puritan ministers and native linguists. The attendant missionary work around that project involved a lot of real estate deals, trying to get land for “praying Indian towns” — communities of Christianized Native Americas.

What really was earnest and kindhearted work from John Eliot was contributing to what was essentially genocide of the local native tribe, and in large part helped lead up to King Phillip’s War. So the book is about those tensions.

The book opens with the murder of John Sassamon, which gave the English the excuse for going to war. And then the book goes back in time and follows Sassamon forward through the translation and conversion work, and his own conversion to become a minister in a praying Indian town.

Talk about your use of archival material.

I’ve worked with archival material on and off since I started writing poetry. And I’ve been fascinated with the language of the 17th century, and with the context of this cauldron of the beginnings of America, which involved so much conflict and the intensities of religion, and multiple cultures coming against each other.

There are huge gaps in the archive — we don’t even have the voice of the English women from the 17th century. And so, as a human being and a poet, I know that there’s a huge emotional and human landscape there, and I wanted to figure out what it might be. In creating the book, I used the archival language for a sort of linguistic momentum, to carry beyond the end of that archival page into the actual lives of the Puritans and the natives.

So I invented human relations for them that we don’t get from the archives. Sassamon and Eliot translated and printed the entire Bible together, so I had to describe the friendship that had to be there. And I gave voice to a female Native American who I put in a relationship with Sassamon, and I gave voice to Anne Eliot, John’s wife.

From an editorial standpoint, your treatment of the archival material is unorthodox.

I use single quotes to indicate the archival material as gently as possible. So, some people would say, “Well, you need to cite the material and say exactly where it comes from.” But that would highlight it, and I actually did not want to footnote. So it’s not a scholarly use of material, though the bibliography mentions all the sources.

But one thing I did at my editors’ request was to find a historian to write the introduction. They wanted a historian to weigh in, to say, “Actually, this is a very curious, an intriguing use of source material that raises interesting questions, even in a book of poetry.”

That was Christine DeLucia, who teaches indigenous and colonial histories of the Northeast at Mount Holyoke. She works in part in memory studies, and she has a forthcoming book about how King Philip’s War is remembered in the Native American communities of the Northeast today.

How does this book align with your earlier work?

The Wampanoag chief Metacomet depicted in a copy of an engraving by Paul Revere, published in The entertaining history of King Philip’s war, by Thomas Church, 1772. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

My first full-length book is called Puritan Spectacle, and I wrote it coming out of research into Puritan conversion narratives at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s a very different book — individual poems, straight poetry, and they don’t make a story. I was looking for the roots of our contemporary consumerist culture in the English language as it first arrived on these shores.

We’ve inherited a style of language that came down across the myths of things like Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims, and those poems infuse it into our contemporary landscape. For example, I have a prayer for Big Macs, a prayer for cheerleaders, a prayer for the mall, and so forth.

When I was doing the research fellowship at the historical society, I was actually the first poet who’d ever gotten this particular fellowship. They didn’t know what to do with me.

There was this night where they would host the research fellows and bring in local historians and people who were interested. You were supposed to read from your work and then talk a little bit. And I read them the “Big Mac Sacrament,” and the look on their faces around the table, I will never forget it.

While I was there, I discovered unpublished letters of John Eliot that appear in Bright Advent. Some of them are his bureaucratic queries and pleading for money to the government of Massachusetts Bay and to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel back in London.

Those letters were so striking both because of their urgent concern for the souls of the Native Americans, and because of this kind of committee-meeting savvy that we’re all familiar with [laughs]. But that’s within the framework of our knowing that his work is contributing toward a war that was eventually just devastating for everyone.

What interests you about 17th-century America?

These are people who are speaking and writing in the same historical and linguistic moment that Shakespeare is. The language is both completely foreign to us and utterly recognizable. The Puritan ministers were so highly educated and articulate, and they had their Hebrew and their Latin.

So their sentences are beautiful, and since most of those sentences are saying something about the beginning of what became America, I find it just to be so powerful and resonant.

You’ve done a few public readings from Bright Advent.

A couple were during the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Washington in February. One of those was in a really loud bar in a Korean restaurant.

At these conferences, most of the readings are group readings where you’re one of 10. And I was like, “Wow, what am I going to do?” So I just chose the opening murder scene and screamed it. And so that worked really well! It was a murder scene screamed in a bar.

And back at Bates, you read during a {PAUSE} gathering.

It was amazing to read in Gomes Chapel because all the characters in this book are so saturated — both in their actual lives and in the story that I tell — with the pressures and intensity of religious striving. So to read it in the chapel space was really, for me just personally, really intense, after I had spent so much time with these characters.

“John Eliot preaching to the Indians,” a wood engraving published in Ballou’s Pictorial, vol. 10, 1856. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

A copy of the poem “Monologue of a Tree Line” by Franz Hodjak, written in the poet’s own handwriting, hangs in the Roger Williams Hall office of Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi.

It was a gift from her dissertation adviser, Peter Stenberg, who had persuaded her to “take a closer look” at Hodjak’s poetry.

“Writing a book about the post-war generation of Romanian-German poets — of which Hodjak is a part — was as close a look as I had imagined at the time,” Cernahoschi says. “But Peter’s gift is a reminder that closeness is subject to the chosen way of seeing.”

The poem:

i always run in two opposite directions at once

while i follow the path i remain immobile

i’ve completely mastered the art of the dialectic

Cernahoschi had seen the poem in its printed version, in the volume Open Letters, where it “conversed” with the poems around it, she says. “I knew that the selection of poems in the volume reflected not only the artistic intentions of the poet but also the effects of censorship” of the era.

Cernahoschi says that the word “dialectic” in the last line is ironic. “In socialist Romania, the Marxist dialectic of historical progress, with the victory of the working class as its end, was a prized trope.”

In the poem, she says, “the dialectic of the tree-lined path points both forward and backward, however. While it nods to progress (‘while I follow the path’), it actually acknowledges standing still (‘i remain immobile’).”

Cernahoschi says she marvels at the poet’s audacious way of seeing, his ability to sneak “uncomfortable truths” past the censor onto the printed page.

Now, she says, she views the poem, isolated by itself in the frame on her wall, differently.

“Seeing clearly the jagged lines of m’s, l’s, f’s, and g’s has helped me discover a new friction in the poem, as if the writing itself were an opposition.”

In the poet’s signature, however, “the round stroke of the H and the finality of the y,” she says, offer a contrast: “Liberation. I can relate — writing is an activity that winds us tighter and tighter until that last stroke or push of the button that signals ‘done.'”

But, she concludes, “I also see past the framed poem to the trees lining the path outside my window, running in two directions at once, moving and immobile at once. Their dialectic is true no matter the prevailing ideology. Some days, it’s a precious reminder, on others, a warning.”

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2017/02/03/object-lesson-handwritten-copy-of-a-poem/feed/0Bates presents a poet whose work is described as ‘fiercely beautiful’http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/11/03/bates-presents-a-poet-whose-work-is-described-as-fiercely-beautiful/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/11/03/bates-presents-a-poet-whose-work-is-described-as-fiercely-beautiful/#respondTue, 03 Nov 2015 21:46:15 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=97632Linda Gregerson, a much-honored author of several collections of poetry, reads from her work at Bates College on Nov. 5.]]>

A Language Arts Live event this week features the author of “dizzyingly ambitious and fiercely beautiful” poetry (The Atlantic).

Linda Gregerson, a much-honored author of several collections of poetry, reads from her work at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. Her books will be available for purchase and signing.

Sponsored by the English department at Bates, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-753-6963.

Gregerson’s collections include this year’s New and Selected Poems; Magnetic North, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; and 2003’s Waterborne, which won a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/11/03/bates-presents-a-poet-whose-work-is-described-as-fiercely-beautiful/feed/0An illustrated reading of ‘Toward Hallowe’en’ by Robert Farnsworthhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2015/10/30/an-illustrated-reading-of-toward-halloween-by-robert-farnsworth/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/10/30/an-illustrated-reading-of-toward-halloween-by-robert-farnsworth/#commentsFri, 30 Oct 2015 15:08:41 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=97567Timely for evoking autumn, and timeless for its existential wit, a reading by Rob Farnsworth, senior lecturer in English, of his poem "Toward Hallowe'en," illustrated by the best of our fall photography. ]]>

Toward Hallowe’en

I woke in painted stillness and stepped
out on the porch. The silted altitudes were
motionless, and although it hadn’t rained,
the light was melancholy, damp, made
for still black boughs and brilliant leaves.
One of those days that deserves its very
own name: Latin for air-without-motive,
autumn-holding-steady. I stared into
the trees, as a child looks into a picture
said to contain a tiger’s smile, a five-
pointed star, a domino, a hand — when with
a sound like distant applause (fainter
than the softball crowds who had rejoiced
all summer beyond the trees), one whole
maple’s wild red leaves poured down
across the street. No wind, no bird, no
squirrel, just a steady shower of leaves
from a stolid tree, so sudden and unanimous
it seemed deliberate. Standing there,
my arms embossed with bedding wrinkles,
I was pierced with recognition acute
and inexplicable as the sweet, focused
ache a finger held inches from my forehead
provokes. I didn’t know why — but that
was joy — release from having to stitch
effect to cause, from having to name each
five-fingered leaf or separate day. They
would fall away in good time, from places
in a picture of the past, into a hushed,
mysterious storm of bright red leaves.

“Toward Hallowe’en” first appeared in Robert Farnsworth’s book Honest Water, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1989. Farnsworth is a senior lecturer in English at Bates.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/10/30/an-illustrated-reading-of-toward-halloween-by-robert-farnsworth/feed/2Language Arts Live returns with famed poet from Northern Irelandhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2015/05/08/language-arts-live-returns-with-famed-poet-from-northern-ireland/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/05/08/language-arts-live-returns-with-famed-poet-from-northern-ireland/#respondFri, 08 May 2015 13:39:40 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=94405Bates College welcomes prize-winning Northern Irish poet Sinèad Morrissey for a reading on May 8.]]>

Part of the Language Arts Live series of literary readings, sponsored by the English department, the event is open to the public at no cost. Morrissey’s books will be available for purchase. For more information, please call 207-786-6256.

In a review of Morrissey’s recent work, The Guardian newspaper wrote, “Morrissey’s poetic framings and exposures of author, reader/viewer, and object in dynamic and angular relation to each other make her a compelling advocate, and exemplary practitioner, of both seeing and doing things differently.”

Morrissey’s reading concludes the Language Arts Live series for this academic year.

Born in 1972 and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Morrissey is the author of (all from Carnet Press) Through the Square Window (2009), The State of the Prisons (2005), Between Here and There (2001) and There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996).

This year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released her collection Parallax, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Among her other awards are the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Michael Hartnett Prize. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition.

After having lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand, Morrissey is a writer-in-residence and lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast and is the city’s inaugural poet laureate.

]]>http://www.bates.edu/news/2015/05/08/language-arts-live-returns-with-famed-poet-from-northern-ireland/feed/0An award-winning poet, Crystal Williams to read in Language Arts Live eventhttp://www.bates.edu/news/2014/11/17/an-award-winning-poet-crystal-williams-to-read-in-language-arts-live-event/
http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/11/17/an-award-winning-poet-crystal-williams-to-read-in-language-arts-live-event/#respondMon, 17 Nov 2014 16:09:04 +0000http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=82194The author of four collections of poems, Crystal Williams reads from her work in a Language Arts Live event at Bates College on Nov. 19.]]>

Crystal Williams, Bates’ chief diversity officer and an associate vice president and English professor, is an award-winning poet.

The author of four collections of poems, Crystal Williams reads from her work in a Language Arts Live event at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the English department, Language Arts Live readings are open to the public at no cost. Williams’ books will be available for purchase and for signing by the poet following the reading. For more information, please call 207-786-6326.

Williams’ most recent collection is Detroit as Barn, published in May by the University of Washington Press. The book was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Cleveland State Open Book Prize.

Her third collection, Troubled Tongues (Lotus Press, 2009), was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award.

Widely anthologized, Williams’ poems appear in such journals and publications as The American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Northwest Review, 5AM, The Sun, Ms. Magazine, The Indiana Review, Court Green and Callaloo, among others.

Raised in Detroit and in Madrid, Spain, Williams holds degrees from New York University and Cornell University, and has received numerous fellowships, grants and honors, including a 2010 appointment as the Mary Rogers Field Distinguished University Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University and a 2012 appointment to the Oregon Arts Commission by Gov. John Kitzhaber.

She served on the faculty of Reed College for 11 years before being appointed Reed’s inaugural dean for institutional diversity. In 2013 she was appointed associate vice president, chief diversity officer and professor of English at Bates.

Open to the public at no cost, this literary reading series continues this winter with Kate Christensen, whose novel The Great Man (Doubleday, 2007) won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (March 6); and widely published poets Brenda Shaughnessy and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 (March 17).

Language Arts Live readings take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays in the Muskie Archives. The series is sponsored by the English department and other departments and programs at Bates.

A poet whose work has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review and The Georgia Review, among many other publications, Mills was born in Chicago. Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.

A graduate of Bucknell and the University of Maryland, where she received a master’s of fine arts degree, Mills is pursuing a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Novelist and memoirist Kate Christensen. (Michael Sharkey)

Christensen has published six novels. Her most recent book, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, was published in 2013 by Doubleday and is described by The New York Times as “a toothsome blend of personal and social history.”

She lives in Portland, Maine, and writes an occasional drink column for The Wall Street Journal called “With a Twist” as well as a bi-monthly column for Medium.com called “Food Stuff: the Elements of Eating.” Christensen writes that she is “a cook of the improvisational, what’s-in-the-cupboard school, which is also, possibly not coincidentally, my strategy with writing. ”

Shaughnessy‘s most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics’ Circle Award; and Interior With Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Slate.com and elsewhere. She is poetry editor-at-large at Tin House Magazine, and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers-Newark. She lives in Brooklyn.

Craig Teicher ’01, poet. (Sarah Tew)

Teicher is a poet, critic and freelance writer. His first book of poems, Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Center for Literary Publishing, 2008) won the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry.

His other books are Cradle Book, a collection of short stories and fables (BOA Editions Ltd., 2010) and To Keep Love Blurry: Poems (BOA, 2012). His poems have appeared all over the U.S., and his reviews of poetry and fiction can be found on NPR.org, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and elsewhere.

He teaches at The New School and New York University and lives in Brooklyn.